Document Actions

"Concept of Deity” by Dr. John Henrik Clarke

To hold a people in oppression you have to
convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

When
the European comes to a country, the first thing he does is to laugh at
your God and your God concept. And the next thing is to make you laugh
at your own God concept. Then he don't have to build no jails for you
then, cause he's got you in a jail more binding than iron can ever put
you.

Anytime you
turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one
needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.

Anytime
someone say's your God is ugly and you release your God and join their
God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in
your own concept of the "deity."

And
that's how we're trapped. We have been educated into believing someone
else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You
have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best
suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you
do that, you don't apologize.

Nothing
the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to
facilitate the European's control over the world. Anything that you get
from Europe that you are going to use for yourself, remake it to suit
yourself.

Where did we go wrong
educationally? After the Civil War, the period called reconstruction, a
period of pseudo-democracy, we began to have our own institutions, our
own schools. We had no role model for a school... our own role
model. So we began to imitate White schools.

Our
church was an imitation of the White church. All we did is to modify
the old trap. We didn't change the images, we became more comfortable
within the trap. We didn't change the images, we changed some of the
concepts of the images, but the images remained the same. So the
mis-education that gave us a slave mentality had been altered. But it
remained basically the same.

The
late Dr. John Henrik Clarke, a pre-eminent African-American historian,
author of several volumes on the history of Africa and the Diaspora,
taught in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter
College of the City University of New York.